Chance and narrative in Jean Paulhan
Philippe Garcin“Who knows if all felicity and true beatitude do not consist in the exact copulations and oppositions of the members of the discourse?” (Giordano BRUNO, Della causa, principio e uno, 1584.)
JOUBERT had taught the method. This perfect artist, rightly convinced that beauty in language is born from meanings carefully, skillfully solicited, diverted certain words from their particular meaning to bring into common speech confusions as sweet to the mind as to the ear. “Banish all abuse of words,” he said, “there are no longer even axioms.” The practitioners came to us. Like Joubert's Greeks, they love the truth, but they like to say it, "even solid, with floating words." Paulhan finally arrived, skilled in his short stories in leaving a gap between what is really said and the words which say it. He makes a little truth work before us which he makes individual, this truth which Joubert called reality in intelligible things and whose nature is hostile to overly apparent precisions. Perhaps not everyone possesses the truth for which they are suited, perhaps some are completely deprived of it. Paulhan describes these intermittences of truth. He teaches his characters not what they don't know about themselves, but to distrust what they think they know about themselves, to guess behind their speeches the chance that inspires these speeches. It gives simple things, confusedly articulated, the appearance of difficulty. Because we have all the answers, we only lack the problems — we are only looking for problems for the answers.
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Paulhan grasps the world below thoughtful attention: he gives the purely sensitive a chance. While in ordinary life, the areas of life explored by the senses are controlled by the relatively critical reflection which forms on them, the author of the astonishing Causes Famous is careful not to give clear ideas time to mature unduly. He describes the given before the creation of meaning, he is the painter of unfinished states. This incomplete consciousness, which nothing inhabits except the object of an otherwise divided attention, forms the soul of the inner world: “...The rest of the day has hardly changed, but this hour is like a twenty-fifth hour, of which someone would have made me a present. I see so many rays and fires flowing there that it finally seems to hold the sky at its sensitive point. (Have a good evening.)
Sensitive devoid of feeling, deprived of this intimate view where Alain discovered the truth of perception (1) and which gives things their natural appearance; surprise replaced expectation. The style itself is not moved: taking before the distinction an unnamed and unnamable world, it barely gives it verbal existence, the habitual creation of discourse. On the contrary, it is a question here of a counter-creation, of a cancellation of everything that exists by everything that describes it. This regression to the first state of life where everything is diluted and liberated, a place of varied implications and combinations, is conducive to metamorphoses. Between the dream and the clear consciousness, suspended, contingent, unacceptable, these states make up the life that is internal to us.
Paulhan creates chance in his writings, not with the rarest thoughts but with the help of the most vague words, taken in a general sense. The slight wavering that he introduces into his sentences is calculated: it resembles the very wavering that our most fierce feelings suppose and understand. The ruse simulates improvidence and does not eliminate it: mixing depravity and a secret ambiguity with his words, he does not disguise their profound truth but rather reveals it; this uncertainty of language encounters and covers a less particular uncertainty: that which governs all the movements that lead us. When he writes (about Violette Nozières): “As she was cold and did not resign herself to being cold, she had more to catch up with each day”, Paulhan restores the feeling to its true contingency, gives it a certain appearance of freedom as evidenced by his free language, full of false rigor. This is why he strives not to take a step back from the event he is stating which would destroy what he declares, but rather to be surprised with surprise or suspicious with distrust, leaving the words with a beautiful and brief ardor, lest by fixing their meaning too firmly they displace what they are intended to express. Worried about the words he uses, he nevertheless chooses to let himself speak. Like Kafka's whistle of Josephine, "this nothingness of voices, this record of nothing asserts itself and opens a path to us."
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In the Causes Famous there is such an economy, such a subtle rarefaction of the words spoken that one gains from reading them, perhaps by a natural effect, the impression of a patient riot of common feelings and of the words which serve to translate them. Paulhan's art of writing is not to be confused with the science of allusion specific to the most brilliant narrators: his frugality bears fruits that are personal to him. Art which reveals the ordinary substance of life not as the object of possible expression, but as that which cannot in any way be expressed.
This parsimony abuses us, but nothing can prevent this abuse from existing. And no doubt the suppressed words, all the evaded or insinuated speeches only derive their existence from the narrow and discreet combinations which governed the choice of words: perhaps the whole mystery comes from this singular contradiction. What is said then only benefits so much from its fixation in a written text, a text where everything is motivated. Literature only lasts through an accumulation of determinations, a hemorrhage of causes and effects: it seems that it requires this astonishing orgy to act.
With Paulhan, chance therefore comes from words, from simple words but assembled with cleverness; the determination here is literary. This singular economy increases the general obscurity. Returned to his own thoughts, the reader completes as best he can the uncertain meaning proposed to him. Paulhan leaves it to him to complete the outlined meanings according to his taste, to slowly recreate an order that almost nothing manifests. Everything remains to be done: it is up to the reader to be gifted. “A set of meanings,” writes Paulhan in the Hain-Tenys, “is made and unmade at every moment through a thousand exchanges.” Casting a little doubt around clear words, he brings minds into agreement on an imprecise image, the one where all thoughts meet: this detour, this embarrassment establishes true universality. Because the vague idea contains within it a purer meaning than the nearest clear idea, too clearly stated. As the perfect according to Descartes contains in itself a necessity of existence or for Joubert carries with it the conviction of its beauty, the language of Paulhan possesses an uneasy and unresolved grace which is in itself already a kind of immediate wisdom.
The uncertainty itself here carries meaning: “Natural expression,” says Joubert, “is not always the most used, but that which conforms to the essence.” Paulhan certainly only uses ordinary words, but he also uses them to define the ways of being intermediate between dreams and attention, to which reason has no access. It is when he tries to acclimatize the inner reality that he reaches the extremity of impotence: in two of the most beautiful Causes: The Endless Thought and The Good Evening, he fails to bring back from the depths of the soul the unknown object that inhabits him, he retains from this failure an interior and personal torment, also undeclarable. In search of a pure feeling, which cannot be verified in relation to anything, a feeling that is truly and in every sense inappreciable, Paulhan only succeeds in causing a remarkable loss of consciousness. It is quite natural that it indetermines mental objects.
Proust speaks somewhere of “this great impenetrable and discouraging night of our soul which we take for emptiness and nothingness”. In Paulhan it seems that it merges with a flow of conceptions whose existence depends only on the attention paid to it and which lasts as long as it does. Paulhan describes an inner life that does not work on its own. But attention according to Paulhan, a strong intimate constraint and clarity of effort, relates to real matter, not to a void and nothingness. It was probably not without design that the text first called, when it appeared in 1945 in the Cahiers du Sud, La pensee sans object changed its title in 1946 and became Endless Thought; it is not by mistake that we no longer find, among other things, in this version the word which appeared in the first: “I think as much as ever... These are the subjects which escape me”. It is quite certain that the subject here is not what escapes, but rather its clarity and the distinctions which concern it.
And as Maast, in the Applied Warrior, enters the fourth week of war "a little out of timidity", it is undoubtedly also out of timidity that he persists in unraveling the secret disorder that occupies him. The research is hazardous, but it is not its object that is lacking. All in all, Jean Paulhan must not have been so delighted to hear of him (by Mr. André Rousseaux) as “an abstractor who needs to clear the air in order to realize”.
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The Causes Célébres, as they say the Great Trials of History. In all of Paulhan's stories there is a vigorous and striking causality, all the more evident as it is more attentive to self-destruction. No mood of the soul, no declared passion here arises from a cause which is external to it: entirely free from the circumstances which could incline it in one direction or the other, the spirit responds regularly with inconsistency to the calls of life. The causes do exist but the effects are contrary to them. This reverse causality, which defrauds, purges the soul of petty motives. Everything conspires to disrupt the prognosis. Thus, in the Applied Warrior, by a strange and yet natural sequence, a near danger and the very proximity of death restore to the soul a sort of freedom with which it is entirely occupied. War, where the established bonds created by use are undone, where horror and death domesticate thoughts, an entirely closed system of causes and effects, sheds light only on itself: it becomes in the end admissible as an innocence refurbished and restored, a sort of repaired childhood, illuminating the state of childhood. In war, an ordered fatality sets scattered thoughts a new point of application, a balance stronger than precarious life, establishes an obscure wisdom which triumphs over all disorders. “Higher up,” said Maast, “...began the half-unconscious life which assured me in this country and in these adventures. I felt more, through the contrast, the order that governed it.
In Severe Healing, the effect responds as well to the cause, but according to a plan and a meaning which are precisely contrary to it: Jacques sick, to transcribe a state full of attraction, finds words which enchant him and which nevertheless will later rightly seem to him absolutely devoid of life ("The charm thus must have been that everything was lost so quickly."). This penetrating charm which does not act, of which the words seem unable to testify due to some particular impossibility, this powerful enchantment which dies in the terms in which it must be fixed, confirms that nothing exists in Paulhan without going directly against what gave birth to and supports it. Each moment brings its death: and these successive deaths, one added to the other, make up the inner course of life.
Diderot explains very well in his Philosophical Thoughts why, according to the laws of spell analysis, the hypothetical duration of chaos is more surprising to the mind than the real birth of a universe. In Paulhan it is not chance which creates a world, it is a restricted but effective and sustained causality which distorts the established world, breaks down the ordinary laws of life, creates new thoughts and powers. Even the state of apparent death which, in Severe Healing, so closely resembles health (“Several times,” says Juliette for example of her dying friend, “I thought he was choosing what he heard”) stands out, with all the care, the efforts, the useless and conscious speculations that it involves, from actual existence — creates a remarkable sort of absence. Paulhan frees the effects. And perhaps part of the lively pleasure we take in reading him comes from the fact that we discern here and there in his writings the traces of an ingenious and adapted return to Malebranche: he spreads occasional causes in his stories, no longer, like Malebranche, to guarantee the infinity of the effective, but to preserve a certain human and mortal form of fortuitousness, a personal part of contingency.
When Causes Famous appeared, Paulhan made the following statement: “I had been preoccupied with Causes since the age of 18. At that time, it was called Tales to sleep on your feet, and it also seems to me that it became - as we progressed in the book - quite frightening. (I did progress.) As for the general meaning: I would have liked to be faithful to this word from I don't know who: "Be careful not to add any personal view to all those who already travel the world." As for the title: there is an astonishing word on this from Saint-Martin: “The number of questions that one cannot ask without becoming the answer oneself is fortunately quite limited”. It's quite enigmatic, and Saint-Martin doesn't explain it, except that, speaking a little further on about these "questions", he calls them "causes". Hear: the questions that we cannot raise without seeing ourselves immediately involved, concerned, without being caught in them. It is the opposite of a pure, detached idea. It is a cause for us. I guessed there were twenty-one. Obviously it's too much. It was to have more luck that the real ones were there. Besides, I only found the word of Saint-Martin long after writing the Causes.”
If famous causes are indeed the questions that we cannot ask without immediately seeing ourselves engaged in them, which understand us and understanding us oblige us, we can find in these very causes a cause stronger than them: and it is, otherwise, this “causality of the cause” which according to Hume and Kant will always escape us - in the events which reproduce themselves, we can only ever grasp a contiguity, a succession and the constancy of conjunctions - at least the cause of causes, which is this freedom left to everything that happens to be freed from its cause and to turn against it.
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No conception, no feeling is clarified in Paulhan by his most certain reason; neither is any one pure of all mixture: each one serves as a foil or a support perhaps, of just the opposite feeling. The inexplicable is expressed here by the swing of opposites. Nothing is experienced, nothing is declared without being immediately canceled out by the annoyance which is, it seems, deeply specific to him: “Thinking about his illness, one would have said, made him distracted,” says Juliette of Jacques in Guérison Severe. Paulhan's world, or the empire of mixed feelings.
Feelings mixed with others, also pushed towards their future destiny. The category of becoming takes in Paulhan's stories the place that that of the past holds for most novelists: each idea here seems attached to its future state, deprived moreover of finality. Paulhan only retains from each action its most visible and newest part. This is because his characters see what exists first with the eyes of the body, and the body remembers less than it anticipates, drawn entirely towards a future that it cannot guess. At the end of the admirable Cause entitled Simple misunderstanding, we read: “...And I let myself go to the pleasures of a death, which my body had first suspected”. In Severe Healing the body is alone exposed to intimately experiencing the nascent healing and the convalescence as healing and as convalescence: “Thus,” says Jacques, “I only find the mechanical part of my life: as if my body alone had been prepared to heal itself.” The soul is still occupied with secret cares which alter it.
It is also quite clear that in the Letter to the Doctor and in the Applied Warrior, everything that happens, everything that is even called to happen is first felt as a kind of physical test: it is the own body first that bears the appreciation. Maast retains from war, through a sort of simulacrum, a comedy of innocence, its obvious and manifest portion, that which, although only sensitive to the senses, nevertheless capsizes the conscience: “As night comes, suddenly Corporal Caronis cries: “Forward!” He jumps over the parapet and I hear him land on the leaves. Immediately Réchia and Ferrer, without saying a word, jumped after him. I follow them, I run, a tree catches me. I jump into a ditch, they are there. “We removed the little post, they say.”
In the excellent Demonstration of the Existence of God which he wrote in 1713, Fénelon assured that what thinks in him is a nothingness of corporeal nature. Paulhan makes us conceive, in addition to a particularly rare form of this “composition” precisely which gave Fénelon the idea of indivisible unity, a thought which draws its support and its departure from the ordinary use of the body.
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Emotions, feelings, which lose their depth in thought, sometimes gain in expression that they find a tinge of pure chance. It is only in words that their intimate night manages to unravel. Inscribed in the language that suits them best, they take on a new clarity, a false clarity soon lost which can only illuminate, within everything, a deep, natural and entirely undeclarable confusion. “Cilia, who tries to explain to the doctor the illness from which her little daughter suffers, as she speaks, discovers her true fear, and is surprised at herself.” (Jacob Cow). “It was only towards morning that I invented being sad and felt saved.” (Passengers) (2). Naming the states of the soul, Paulhan at the same time reveals their most appropriate meaning, the meaning in which all reason will perish. Language draws from the world an insufficient first truth — a truth as if simulated. Paulhan's admirable style achieves a thought almost free from any image, reduced to its most complex, its most particular expression; the arrangement of words is so prepared, so calculated that only the mystery passes through. This style, to which Cicero's troubling advice to the orator is so well suited: "Adhibere quandam in dicendo speciem atque pompam et pugnæ similem fugam", and which reaches its most perfect happiness in the Causes Celebrees because perhaps there he really chooses to no longer deliver any certainty, provides information but makes nothing intelligible. It can only suggest the vague by an abuse of incidents or the use of varied figures (those where the attribute, for example, precedes the attributed object). The ordinary exercise of speech does not free Paulhan's characters from any deep concern and even less from the confused scruples which torment them: the attentive practice of words and a skillful treatment of language allow them at most to rejoin the natural and hazardous life of things, a nature which is only a desert of language, a chance which despairs research. “Thus – says Maast in the Applied Warrior – our ill-prepared feelings found themselves caught off guard”. Feelings are here caught in an ignorance, an insecurity from which no act, no encounter can free them. Chance and language in these short stories alternate by ardently contradicting each other: nothing comes to correct this ardor and this constant contrariety. Like the God of Saint Augustine, Paulhan does not even allow things to perish that are mutually destroyed.
PHILIPPE GARCIN.
(1) In his little treatise on Lagneau, so admirable in all respects, Alain writes in particular: “There is no perception except through a truth of perception and the truth of perception cannot be perceived... For whom appearance, if appearance is not a moment surpassed?”
(2) At the very beginning of his remarkable and decisive Research on the nature and functions of language (1942), Parain rightly declares: “Every time we are in distress, it is language which brings us the necessary solution. When her child dies, the mother laments and help comes from there. Yet his only desire would be to bring him back to life.”